Barbara Grad (born 1950) is an American artist and educator, known for abstract, fractured landscape paintings, which combine organic and geometric forms, colliding planes and patterns, and multiple perspectives.Yau, John. Barbara Grad – FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions], Catalogue, essay, Palm Beach, FL: Findlay Galleries, 2018.McQuaid, Cate. "Fasten Your Seat Belts For 'Off Road'", Boston Globe, June 24, 2016. Her work's themes include the instability of experience, the ephemerality of nature, and the complexity of navigating cultural environments in flux.Stapen, Nancy. "Barbara Grad," ARTNews, December 1996.Kirsch, Elisabeth. "Exhibit is a Higher Form of Art," The Kansas City Star, March 10, 2011, p. 18. While best known as a painter, Grad also produces drawings, prints, mixed-media works and artist books. She has exhibited in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, Rose Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and A.I.R.,Frenn, Chawky. 100 Boston Painters, Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2012, p. 82–3.Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. "The Big Reveal," Exhibition program, 2011.Rose Art Museum. Restive Visions, Catalogue, Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, 1989. and been reviewed in publications, including Artforum,Koslow-Miller, Francine. "Barbara Grad," Artforum, January 1997, p 89. Arts MagazineWestfall, Stephen. "Barbara Grad," Arts Magazine, December, 1985, p. 125. and ARTnews. Grad co-founded Artemisia Gallery, one the country's first women-artist collectives, in Chicago in 1973. She has been an educator for over four decades, most notably at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Grad has been based in the Boston area since 1987.Findlay Galleries. Barbara Grad – FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions, Catalogue, Palm Beach, FL: Findlay Galleries, 2018.
Grad's work is noted for its loose, painterly invented spaces, lush color, and ability to conjure wide-ranging allusions to land and seascapes, urban sprawl, or ecological concerns.O'Brien, Barbara. "The Circumstantial Evidence of Place, Finding Our Way Into (and Out of) a Painting," Video Villa: New Paintings by Barbara Grad, Exhibition essay. Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011.Koslow-Miller, Francine. Barbara Grad: Lost Horizons, Boston: Howard Yezerski Gallery, 2013.Taylor, Robert. "The striking visions of eight area artists," Boston Globe, March 26, 1989. In 2018, critic John Yau wrote that Grad's "patterns and striations evoke watery reflections and geological strata, tilled land and strip mines, without shedding their identity as abstract, painterly marks. […] She evokes a world undergoing myriad changes, from the incremental and unavoidable to the deliberate and cataclysmic." Describing the 2016 Grad show "Off Road," The Boston Globe'''s Cate McQuaid observed, "Grad paints energy and movement, not things. [Her] stripes, colors, and crashing forms conveying urgency as she places us on the precipice of chaos."
Life and career Grad was born Barbara Janet Horwitz in Chicago, Illinois in 1950. She studied painting, as well as photography, drawing, printmaking and art history, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; artist and painter Ray Yoshida and art historian Whitney Halstead were strong influences. In 1972, she completed her BFA and married Sheldon Grad (divorced, 1973); she earned an MFA there in 1975.The Open Studios Press. New American Paintings Number 26, Terri Sultan, Curator, Wellesley, MA: The Open Studios Press, March 2000, p.70–3. While in school, Grad exhibited at the Artemisia, Allan Frumkin and Nancy Lurie galleries, and in the Art Institute of Chicago's prestigious "Artists of Chicago and Vicinity" shows (1973, 1975). She also began teaching part-time at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1974).Sherwood, Susan L. "Finalist hopes to create visual poetry," The Wayland Town Crier, August 19, 2004, p. 19, 25.
In 1976, Grad took a full-time teaching position at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. When she tired of small-town life in 1979, she moved into a cheap loft in the "flower district" on the outskirts of current-day Chelsea in New York City, continuing to exhibit in Chicago and nationally.The Wayland/Weston Town Crier. "Danforth Museum Exhibit," The Wayland/Weston Town Crier, September 9, 2010, p. 9. In 1981, she joined the full-time faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she remained until retiring as Professor Emerita in 2015. She commuted from New York until 1987, when she moved to Boston and married Peter Allen; three years later their son, Samuel, was born.Wilson, Tammy. "Transplanted big-city artist finds fresh inspiration here," The Wayland/Weston Town Crier, May 9, 1996. In subsequent decades, Grad has had notable solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, the Bernard Toale, Howard Yezerski and Miller Yezerski galleries (Boston), and Findlay Galleries (New York and Palm Beach). Grad lives with her husband and works in Wayland, Massachusetts, outside of Boston.
Work and reception Grad emerged amid a period of intense artistic activity in Chicago in the early 1970s, alongside new gallery districts, critical voices, alternative art spaces, and the Chicago Imagists.Schulze, Franz. "Art in Chicago: The Two Traditions," in Art in Chicago 1945-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p.16-20. Retrieved October 12, 2018. She credits that time, and teachers like Yoshida, with sparking her interest in Outsider artists with a personal vision, such as Joseph Yoakum and Lee Godie, who continue to influence her. Grad incorporated those influences alongside modernists like Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, and Bay Area Painters such as David Park.Belz, Carl. Barbara Grad: Lost Horizons, Boston: Howard Yezerski Gallery, 2013. She generally rejects explicit imagery in favor of invented spaces that she creates with paint and color, which serve as metaphors for the complexity and instability of experience, culture and the environment.Davis, Lindsey. "'Lost Horizons' at Howard Yezerski Gallery," Artscope, February 19, 2013. Retrieved September 28, 2018.
Early work Grad is often highly influenced by her environment. For a three-year period in the late 1970s, she commuted from Indiana to Chicago in a small plane, drawing aerial views on the trips. The imagery found its way into her work—and continues to—in ribbon-like bands of modulated color and patterning that suggested landscapes and plant forms, which she sometimes combined with geometric shapes, as in the painting, Trails (1978). This work, which she exhibited at Artemisia and Jan Cicero Gallery, included paintings and mixed-media pieces that sometimes incorporated weaving. After moving to New York in 1979, Grad began explored imagery from her new surroundings—cityscapes, street life, pinball machines, the figure—in more representational paintings that she exhibited at 55 Mercer Gallery in New York and Jan Cicero in Chicago.
Abstractions of nature In the 1980s and 1990s, Grad returned to nature, and eventually, abstraction, influenced by her commutes to Boston and move to more pastoral Wayland, Massachusetts in 1991. Art historian Bonnie Grad (no relation) wrote that this new work "transports viewers to a primordial natural world of incipient becoming."Grad, Bonnie. "Barbara Grad," Exhibition essay, Boston: Bernard Toale Gallery, 1996. Her first solo exhibition in Boston (Bernard Toale, 1996) was a synthesis of her travel and nature experiences and her sophisticated integration of abstraction and referential imagery.McQuaid, Cate. Review: "Barbara Grad: References: 1996–7," Boston Globe, C12, December 12, 1997. These new paintings, such as Fruit of the Vine (1996), employed autumnal washes of loose, patchwork grids that formed fractured, Cubist pictorial spaces, onto which she layered lyrical, rhythmic plays of biomorphic shapes, resembling seeds, pods, ferns or branches about to blossom or fruit.Spirito, Mari. "Wolf Kahn & Barbara Grad," ArtsMedia, October 1996.Sherman, Mary. "A gala of galleries," The Tab, September 17, 1996. She unified the compositions by overlaying heavy, map-like white and black line work suggesting tendrils, vessels and honeycombs, which brought the organic forms into focus.
Critics noted the work's lush depths and handling of paint, which appeared both spontaneous and controlled. Artforum's, Francine Koslow-Miller compared the "primitive stylizations and pictographic lines" to the work of Adolph Gottlieb. Nancy Stapen of ARTnews wrote that the work recalled the "circular, fertile forms" of Lee Krasner and "the lyricism of Arthur Dove and the impassioned vision of Marsden Hartley," but marked Grad's shift in emphasis from modernist essential forms to fleeting depictions of air, light, the passing of seasons, and "nature's ceaseless flux."
Drawings and mixed media series Grad has produced drawings, prints and mixed media art throughout her career.Barbara Grad website. Mixed Media works, Archived Works. Retrieved October 29, 2018. Her drawing exhibition at Bernard Toale (2000) featured painterly watercolor and ink works on mylar and paper, that mixed text, abstract shapes and a detailed, "secret" visual language reminiscent of Klee or Miró.Foster, Richard. "Barbara Grad's maps of the mind," South End News, September 21, 2000, p. 19, 24. Cate McQuaid called it "meaty, satisfying work" that unpeeled like onion skins to reveal layers of subtle, translucent organic forms and ideas involving spirituality and consciousness; others described the pieces as challenging "koans" enacting an uneasy truce of nature and geometry.McQuaid, Cate. "Painterly drawings," Boston Globe, September 14, 2000. In the Boston Center for the Arts traveling group show "Standing on One Leg" (2005–8), Grad exhibited mixed-media works, such as Balancing Balls (2005), and incised etchings on plexiglass. The etchings, which featured diagrammatic drawings of human figures, architecture and hieroglyphics, were placed off the wall, creating a subtle play of ephemeral line and shadows.O'Brien, Barbara. "Standing on One Foot," Standing on One Foot, Catalogue essay, Boston: Boston Center for the Arts, 2005.Foritano, James. "Standing on One Foot—Or Trying," Standing on One Foot, Catalogue, Boston: Boston Center for the Arts, 2005.Plummer, D'Lynne. "Body language," South End News, Sept 29, 2005. Critics and curators described the explorations of primal myths, belief systems and the body's relation to the cosmos as playful, clever and intriguing.McQuaid, Cate. "Arresting views of an uncomfortable world," Boston Globe, October 14, 2005, Weekend D7.Fardy, Jonathan. "Standing on One Foot @ The BCA," Big RED and Shiny: An Arts Journal, Issue #28, October 2005.
Grad has also produced more than seventy artist books.Hagan, Debbie. "From Hand to Hand, Artist Books, Art New England.Barbara Grad website. Books, Archived Works. Retrieved October 29, 2018. In 1996, she exhibited the "Origins" series, which features small "dreamscapes" that unfold in accordion formats, echoing the layered abstraction of her paintings. Between 2002 and 2004, she created a socially oriented series of books, including Random Data and Enemy Territory (made as America entered the Iraq War), that incorporated abstract heads and figures, text, numbers, and diverse forms and materials such as eggshells and boots.
Abstract landscapes